Cover Her Face Major Spoilers for 1018
by Lin M
Summary: 10.18 from Kerry Weaver's POV. Seriously: major spoilers. You don't want to know? Look away now.


**Author's Name**    Lin

**Email**                      lin.morris@btopenworld.com

**Title**                       Cover Her Face

**Category**               Angst. 

**Rating**                    R (swearing)

**Spoilers **                Up to 10.18, "Where There's Smoke".

**Summary**              After 10.18.  Kerry Weaver POV. 

**Complete**               Yes.

**Other**                     Spoilers from casting sides for this episode were released on 29/30 January 2004: the story 

was written 31 January 2004.  At the time of writing, no information for 10.19 onwards was available. 

**Disclaimer**

The characters and setting of ER are the property of NBC, Warner Bros., Amblin Entertainment and Constant C Television.

**COVER HER FACE**

Kerry Weaver had been at Sandy Lopez's funeral since the first day they'd met. 

Every shift, every day, every night. Knowing this could be the one. Knowing that every firefighter brought into her ER could be Sandy. If it not this time, maybe next. Or the time after that. 

When they'd finally moved in together, Kerry had realised it would probably take place in the brick church two blocks away from their new place, but it was Catholic, so she'd never gone in. That explained why she hadn't anticipated the fierce draught sawing at her ankles, the depressing but hard-wearing chrysanthemums, and a small patch in the ceiling where the plaster had fallen down so she could see the laths beyond it. She supposed that was why every wall in the vestry had a badly drawn poster mugging the congregation for the restoration fund. 

She hadn't been prepared for the solidarity from the fire station. They'd treated her no differently from Mason's wife. Sandy really had been one of the guys. 

Mason's widow.

Kerry was well prepared for the cold shoulder from the Lopez family. She'd known from the terrible evening they'd first met that they hated and blamed her, even though Sandy had never seen it. _Relax, chica,_ she'd said, _relax. They're cool with this. You're imagining it. I've never met anybody so uptight as you . Everything's gonna be OK. _ But it wasn't, and there hadn't been time for Henry to make it OK. 

No man knows the day, or the hour. 

†††††††††

Elizabeth Corday had offered to come, and Kerry was grateful but there was no way she was going to let her. Because the last thing she wanted to do was turn up at a funeral with a woman Guillermo and Florina had never met, and who couldn't pass for family the moment she opened her mouth. You could bet your last dollar that Florina would cast about until she found the wrong end of some stick and then beat you to death with it. No way was Kerry going to gift the bitch grounds to accuse her of bringing a new floozy to her daughter's funeral. She could hear it in her head already: _My own child not cold in her grave and that old pervert flaunting her new fancy woman in  front of my face, laughing at us decent folks who raised Sandy right. _

Since the second last thing she'd wanted to do was explain that to Elizabeth, she'd been decently grateful, and instead asked Elizabeth to bring Ella round to their place and babysit Henry. Her place.

Bringing Luka would just start up the speculation over Henry's father again, so the poor man would get caught up in a fight with Carlos. And she'd have to lock herself in the bathroom crying into her fist, half-heartedly wishing that Luka wouldn't beat Carlos's head to a bloody pulp on the sidewalk, and remembering a tickling fight in bed one summer Sunday morning as Sandy teased her about secretly fantasising about him, and when she'd given up fighting back and denying it, they'd made love over and over and over, like they never ever would again. 

Jeanie couldn't have come for the same reasons Elizabeth couldn't, plus they both knew Jeanie thought Sandy was a bitch-monster from hell, no point in pretending otherwise, and no matter how you hide it, you really shouldn't be at a funeral if you're glad the person is dead and other people actually know that you are.  

Morgenstern couldn't get a flight in from Nebraska, or wouldn't, so Don Anspaugh had insisted, and she'd let him win, because she got tired of saying _no_. The firefighters all knew him so nobody was going to get that wrong, and not only wouldn't he care about the Lopez family, he wouldn't say a word about them to anybody at the hospital. 

†††††††††

She'd intubated Sandy because she had to. She hadn't wanted to, hell no. It wasn't because she didn't trust Susan to do it. In fact, Susan would probably have done a better job, for once. It was because she couldn't bear to be on the outside, failing to keep Sandy alive.  Especially since she knew Sandy hated doctors, up to and including obstetricians, and she wasn't a doctor here, she was somebody Sandy said she trusted, and she couldn't bear to let Sandy down on that. 

If she'd cut open Lucy's chest wall to try to save her, she could do that much for Sandy.  Even if her better self could call the odds with blunt trauma to the chest and pelvis.

And she'd been too ashamed to say any of that to Susan, too ashamed to say she was doing it for her own sake, so she'd wrapped it up in a lie like a big pink bow, and said the one thing she was sure would work, "She's my wife."

After she'd intubated Sandy, she'd had to step out and let the others work on her, because she couldn't see what she was doing for the tears.  

†††††††††

Before they took Sandy up to surgery, Susan told  her a kind lie, like doctors had been telling her since she was six, and said "She's a fighter". And like she'd done since she was six, she'd swallowed her tears and smiled and lied back gratefully, saying "Yes", because if she didn't go along with the lie,  she'd have nothing and no-one. 

She could remember the moment when she knew she was going to sit in on the operation. Not that she'd wanted to. But the alternative was waiting in the lounge upstairs, while Florina and Guillermo and Carlos grilled her for Sandy's last words before she lost consciousness, over and over and over, and got their hopes up without reason, and never any chance of escaping anywhere quiet with Henry, not for a moment.  

Then Mason's wife heard her husband was dead, and screamed.

No way was she going to find out from somebody else, in a strange place, surrounded by strangers.

The price was promising to let the strangers know how the surgery went.

†††††††††

She'd forgotten how calm an OR could be. She stroked Sandy's hair. Harsh. Curly. A mess, often. It wasn't morning hair, she'd teased Sandy once, early on, and Sandy had gone out and bought about every hair product in Chicago to try to prove her wrong. 

The last time she'd had her hands in Sandy's hair they'd embraced, kissed, but not quite made love, too tired, too happy from settling Henry down. 

When _had_ they last made love? 

"Three years they'd been together", she told Elizabeth. Two and a half, from start to finish, if you didn't count that couple of months at the beginning, the first time it had ended.  She wished they'd had more time as a family, so she stretched the truth as far as she could without actually breaking it.  

"Longer if you count a pregnancy", countered Elizabeth.

  
She stared down at a lock of Sandy's hair gripped between her white knuckles and did not say,  "Two pregnancies."  

"We met in the hospital", she said, offering up a small secret to hide the big one. It wasn't strictly true: they'd met in a wrecked ambulance in the rain, but that time they'd been fighting. Only when they got to the hospital had they got to know each other, a little. And it was in the hospital that she'd clumsily, shyly asked Sandy out, so she figured it was true, sort of, provided you weren't too literal. 

And when they'd met she'd examined Sandy's hand and even put in some sutures, so you could say intubating her this time brought them full circle. 

"That happens a lot", said Elizabeth, putting in sutures fast in Sandy's lacerated liver, betraying no pity for Kerry as she sat in on Sandy's surgery as Elizabeth had once sat in on Mark's. 

"A lot?" wondered Kerry, and then thought back. Yes, it had happened a lot, for both of them. She looked up at Elizabeth, and they both smiled.

Kerry supposed this officially rescinded Elizabeth's death curse.

"Mark was a good man", she said, meaning: he didn't deserve to die, too young, horribly, leaving a widow and a baby who would never know him or love him, alone, alone, alone. 

†††††††††

Sandy arrested.

She begged Sandy not to die on her. 

Elizabeth opened Sandy's chest and shocked her.

She urged Sandy to fight.

Elizabeth shocked her again.

She heard her voice, breaking, crying. _You promised, you said we were in this together._

Sandy died.

Elizabeth called it. 

She stroked Sandy's hair. _You promised._

Elizabeth offered to tell the family. 

She said no. Because she'd promised Sandy's mother she would. 

She sat with Sandy. If it was still Sandy. 

Elizabeth said she could. 

She stroked Sandy's dead hair and kissed her warm forehead, like she'd kissed Mrs Brennan's. She remembered saying, _I love you too Mom_, to the stranger who wasn't her mother. Sitting beside Sandy's body, she could not say a word. 

Just as she could not when Sandy had called out across the delivery room that she loved her, while she stood on the other side of the room with her son.

Somebody else would need the OR soon.

She stood up. Hard without her crutch. She looked down inside  Sandy's ruined body, and wished she could draw a sheet over her. Clean her up. It wouldn't be harder than seeing to Lucy, except that Romano was long gone too. Somebody else would have to do it. 

It wasn't fair. 

None of this was fair.

†††††††††

Kerry opened the door of the surgical lounge. It was full. She blinked. She hadn't been thinking past Florina Lopez. The firefighters, Guillermo, Carlos: she had not expected them. Now she had no idea what to say. 

She didn't have to say anything. Florina took one look at her dazed face and knew. She just knew, in the same way Kerry dreaded she would know if somebody came to tell her Henry was dead.  

Then the Lopez family turned their backs the better to weep together,

Bitch or no, Florina was a grieving mother: Kerry could respect her wishes.  She was about to back out when one of the fire-fighters came over. She barely registered who he was as he put his hand on her shoulder and told her Sandy would be missed. They all said that, more or less, and just as she thought it was all over and she could get away before she started screaming, one of the guys handed her a large yellow object. 

Kerry wondered why, and then realised. It was a fireman's helmet. Sandy's helmet. 

What the bloody fuck was she supposed to do with the smoke-stained helmet that had failed to save Sandy's life? 

†††††††††

When Kerry carried Henry in through her front door, she nearly fell over Sandy's gym bag. She felt sick. All those damn hours Sandy had spent working out to get back in shape after Henry was born, and what had it got her? Just as dead, only quicker.

Henry had reached his limit for the day, picked up on her mood, and started to wail. Kerry hushed him, was grateful to have something to do that took her away from her hateful, hating self, and carried him to the nursery which Sandy had decorated when she had been nesting. 

He didn't need  changing.  Not that Chicago's finest female firefighter was going to be braving any more dirty diapers.

Kerry sat in the not very comfortable rocking chair with the paint runs that she had pretended not to notice, and held the baby to her. He stopped crying, eventually. 

_It's just us now, Henry,_ she said gently. _Just the two of us._

She realised that didn't sound so bad now she'd said it out loud.  

†††††††††

In the days before the funeral, between insurance papers and the Lopez family lawyer giving in gracelessly over  Henry, Kerry heard enough from her visitors from the fire station and the news to piece together the story.

Turned out Sandy and her guys had died for nothing. A fire in an abandoned warehouse. There was nothing in there. They could have let it burn. There was nobody in there. They should have let it burn.

Sandy could have stopped them going in, but no. She got one man killed, disabled another, and died herself. Lucky nobody else died trying to save them. 

Kerry wondered why the other fire-fighters and their widows didn't blame Sandy. She did.

Sandy was a Lieutenant. She didn't have to be out on a call at all. At her rank, she should have been riding a desk. She certainly didn't have to race two men to the top of the building, just to prove she was one of the guys despite giving birth two months ago. 

Truth was, Sandy couldn't stand failure. 

That was why Henry was here. Sandy was set on having a family. Kerry had tried to have their baby the year before, but she had lost her child. So Sandy had to have Henry. Because Kerry was a failure, and Sandy wasn't. 

†††††††††

"My wife was a Quaker," confided Don Anspaugh in an undertone, looking round the church, nodding at the firefighters he knew. 

Kerry grimaced. So neither of them knew the Catholic order of service. She was afraid she was going to make a fool of herself, and wished she asked Luka to come with her after all.

She stared hopelessly at the hideous over-priced casket, wishing she felt grief, or pain, or anguish, anything.  

She sweated through the unfamiliar liturgy, snatching at words she did not recognise, to tunes she could not carry, in prayers to a God she did not believe in. 

Don wasn't much better, but Don wasn't being judged. 

Kerry felt thirty pairs of Lopez eyes burning into her back, and realised she would never again fight with Sandy over her ghastly family.

Because Sandy was long gone. Gone from Chicago, gone from the Fire Service, gone from the Lopezes, gone from her, gone from Henry. 

Don was doing that manly thing of clenching his jaw, and staring ferociously into the middle distance so as not to cry. Kerry felt the tears start to roll down her face, and let them.

Gone, all gone.

†††††††††

Under a low afternoon sun, the mourners at Sandy's funeral walked out onto the sidewalk. They loved, they hated, they envied, and this afternoon they knew for certain that they would die. 

But Sandy knew nothing, neither love, nor hate, nor envy, and would never again have any part in their lives, no, nor in anything else under the sun. 

†††††††††


End file.
